She lived south of Nashville, in a big house in Brentwood bought with the royalties from a bad country song. When her husband, the singer of the song, moved out, he took the furniture with him, out of spite, and stored it in six large units at a place on Nolensville Road. She kind of liked the house without furniture—she had acres of parquet floor on which, after a few glasses of wine, she liked to slide in her sock feet—but one of the toilets downstairs ran constantly, which drove her crazy. She could hear it all over the house, even when she covered her head with a pillow. The plumber she called was a singer, of all things—Arlen Jones, the High Lonesome Plumber, that’s what his ad said in the Yellow Pages—and it was the High Lonesome Plumber who now sat backwards astride her noisy toilet, working on something inside the tank while she leaned against the doorjamb and watched.
The plumber’s pants had not slid down the way one frankly expected a plumber’s pants to, but when he leaned over the tank, his golf shirt slid up his back, and she found herself staring at the thin column of curly, gray hair that had migrated north of his belt. She looked at her wine glass and set it down on the counter. She had no idea why she had called a plumber who wanted to be a singer instead of a plumber who just wanted to be a plumber, because—for the moment, anyway—she hated all singers and thought that the world would be a better place if somebody invented some kind of bomb to drop on Nashville that would kill all the singers without hurting anybody else. Well, maybe not all the singers. Maybe just the hat acts. That’s what all Nashville needed—a hat-act bomb. Her soon-to-be ex-husband, the furniture thief, was a hat act.
The plumber slid off of the seat, got down on one knee, and twisted the valve open. They listened. Once the tank filled, the water stopped running and did not start up again. Her house was cavernous. He stood and looked at her.
“It was just a seal,” he said.
“A seal?” she said, thinking suddenly of ice, of some man in a fur parka looking through binoculars.
He blinked a couple of times, then grinned. “They’re bad this time of year,” he said. “Them seals.”
She covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks were hot. Too much merlot. She wondered if her lips were purple.
The plumber sat down on the toilet and began putting his tools into a canvas bag. He looked up at her and smiled again.
“I’m so stupid,” she said.
His brow dipped once, but he didn’t stop smiling. “Don’t say that,” he said. “No reason you should know anything about seals.” He jerked his head at the tank. “That kind, anyway.”
She wanted to change the subject and asked, “Why do you call yourself ‘the high lonesome plumber’?” even though she already knew the answer. Singers.